The one that got away

For John Sheppard, the 1979 ATCC will forever be the one that got away. Here the former HDT boss provides his recollections of a turbulent championship season and the battle against the privateer Hogdson Torana team.

There was plenty of aggro around touring car racing in 1979. And with Allan Moffat and his Falcon losing their competitiveness, most of that aggro centred on the two main Holden teams – the factory-backed Marlboro Holden Dealer Team and leading privateer Ron Hodgson Racing.

MHDT team chief John Sheppard had brie y worked for Hodgson in the late-1960s and had no time for the man, who took his own life in 1990 at the age of 60. In an interview for this article, Sheppo described the Sydney car dealer and team owner as ‘an evil bastard’ who would be more than capable of underhand tactics. He even suspected Hodgson was behind the disappearance during that bitter 1979 campaign of some very speci c MHDT components

– a radiator, crankshaft, cylinder heads and camshaft.

Drivers Peter Brock and Bob Morris were once HDT teammates, but years of butting heads on

track in similar cars can damage relationships, especially when one usually has the upper hand and is not accustomed to being beaten. And in 1979 it quickly turned sour when the pair tangled on only the second lap of the championship through the hairpin at Symmons Plains.

The Hodgson team believed the dealer team received special treatment from the factory, and the MHDT in turn reckoned they were beaten to the ’79 Australian Touring Car Championship because their Sydney rivals were cheating. Brock said as much at the time, and now Sheppard has nally come out in agreement.

MHDT personnel at the time believed that Morris’ engines exceeded the permitted 5.0-litre capacity, at least at AIR. A quirk of the Torana A9X was that the right-hand cylinder head was more difficult to remove, so post-race capacity checks were always conducted on the lefthand side. It was therefore suspected that the Hodgson Toranas were able to get away with bigger right-hand bores and were consequently more powerful than even the acclaimed Neil Burns-built MHDT engines.

After the ATCC decider, when Morris famously beat Brock to the line at Adelaide International Raceway to clinch an upset title win, Peter was livid. As he told me a few months later: “When one Torana passes another Torana down the main straight at Adelaide with sheer power, there’s not very much you can do about it.Yet two months later at Bathurst, that same Torana wasn’t passing me down the straights. Those are the facts.”

Sheppard at the time played the corporate straight bat, publically paying tribute to a team that just happened to be owned by Holden’s biggest and most in uential dealer.

“The best man on the day won the championship, that’s all there was to it,” he told me a few days after the race. “As far as I’m concerned there was nothing wrong with our car and Peter was beaten fair and square. Any

Sheppard today believes the Hodgson team wasn’t playing with a straight bat. He was also unhappy with his own driver’s performance, claiming Peter Brock was distracted by the upcoming Repco Round Australia Trial.

suggestion that we had problems with our tyres or that our engine was down on power is pure rubbish. Bob Morris has been trying to win this championship for seven years. He was t and alert all weekend [a clear dig at Brock] and went out and won the race. We just have to cop it sweet.”

Brock might have been naïve to think that Sheppard could have said anything else, but relations between the team boss and his star driver were already fractious – Sheppo was critical of Brock’s lifestyle (“He’s living on a diet of tea and hamburgers”) and accused him of being distracted by the upcoming Round Australia Trial – and Brock was furious that his boss hadn’t backed him up after Adelaide.

But now, 40 years later, Sheppo is happy to admit he also thought the Hodgson Torana had a big engine, and that the series scrutineer – his disgruntled MHDT predecessor, Harry Firth – had turned a blind eye that day at AIR.

“Harry was the scrutineer, and every race meeting we had to pull the engine down,” he recalls. “We get to Adelaide and Bob Morris goes (Sheppard whistles) and passes Peter down the straight, but when we came in after the race for the CAMS scrutiny, Harry said, ‘Oh, we won’t do anything; that was a good result.’

“I’m as convinced as I can be that it had a cheater engine. But we couldn’t, as the factory team, sook about someone beating us.”

Horsepower, however, wasn’t the only technical issue Brock was dealing with at AIR. After years running on Dunlop tyres, the MHDT had done an exclusive deal with Bridgestone for 1979, and it took six months to get them right. Once they did, Brock dominated the enduros at Sandown and Bathurst, but for the ATCC it had been a problem.

Brock outquali ed Morris seven times out of eight in the ATCC, but won only three rounds. And it wasn’t simply a case of Brock using quali ers, as the Hodgson team suspected. The MHDT had to use larger-diameter wheels to t the Bridgstones and that meant lowering the A9X, which exacerbated its lack of suspension travel. Consequently, it often hit the bump stops, which resulted in somewhat squirrelly handling and made the tyres go off in the races.

And that’s what Morris observed in the title decider in Adelaide. “I followed Brock for eight laps until his tyres appeared to go off,” he noted.

Brock had used Bridgestones as a privateer in 1975-77, but these were new developments, and the team had to be patient while waiting for the pay-off.

“Bridgestone have put in a lot of time and effort, and to keep faith we’ve stuck by them,” Brock told me at the time, admitting that they had experienced ‘a few minor developmental problems’ during the ATCC.

For the series decider, Brock was again on pole, but it didn’t take long on race day for him to realise they had once again opted for a tyre that would not last.

“Every year we come here we go too soft with tyres, but we always make the same mistake,” he wrote in his post-race newspaper column. “After about ve laps I made certain signs to ‘Shep’ and he just put his hands up and said, ‘Ohhh, stuuuff...’

“Every now and again I’d have a go at Bob and close the gap, but it was impossible to keep up. A couple of times he started to lock wheels and get a bit out of shape and I’d say, ‘Keep it up, keep it up,’ but I had to ease off from time to time because of my tyres going off.”

Morris on his proven Dunlops took the chequered ag just 0.6s clear of his rival and afterwards hugged Hodgson in delight at winning his rst national title. Sheppo was magnanimous in defeat and even invited the victors to MHDT’s post-race party, but apparently Brock made Morris none too welcome.

Earlier in the year, Sheppard had also offered aid and comfort to old rival Allan Moffat, who was battling along as a privateer with his aging Falcon Hardtop after Ford had pulled out of racing. The MHDT chief understood that a Holden domination would not be good for the category and offered Moffat advice to resolve a long-running oil surge problem that saw the big Falcon consistently blowing engines.

“I used to get on quite well with Moffat,” Sheppard says. “He had a problem with oil surge and at Oran Park I went around to where he was preparing his car and I told him what we were doing with our car, which didn’t have oil surge. I told him if he did that on his car he wouldn’t have oil surge.

“Next day, out he comes and blows up another engine. I said to him, ‘Did you do exactly what I told you to do with your sump?’ And he said, ‘Yep, and I put in some of that foam that you put in the fuel tank.’ And I said, ‘Well that’s a good idea – if you want to stop the oil from getting back to the oil pick-up!’ Then he said, ‘Aw, but you’ve got a front sump, Sheppard, and ours is a rear sump.’

“When we got the Commodore (later that year), it was the same (location) as theirs, so I rang up and said, ‘Hey, Allan, we haven’t got any oil surge and it’s a front sump!’ and he said, ‘Aw, piss off Sheppard.’”

Soon after, Sheppard did piss off, leaving the MHDT and the Commodore programme to Brock, who set things right by winning back the ATCC crown. But he never could erase that 1979 victory by Bob Morris, a title he always thought should have been his.